The Missing Eleven Minutes

Chapter One: The Ice Road

The pine boughs began three hundred yards out from the boat landing, black against the snow, stuck upright in the ice like a line of small mourners.

Joss Dennison counted them as the car crept forward. Fourteen, then twenty, then she lost the number in a gust of loose powder that came skating across the lake and broke apart on the windshield. Beyond the boughs there was nothing but white, and beyond the white, faint as a pencil smudge, the tree line of an island.

"You can go faster," Reed said. "Honestly. Twenty-five is fine."

"I'd rather not."

"There's twenty-eight inches under us. It'll hold a school bus."

"It'll hold a school bus until it doesn't."

He let it go. Her husband had a talent for letting things go; it was one of the first things she had noticed about him, and for a long time she had thought it was patience. He sat with his gloved hands on his knees and looked out at the frozen expanse of Winnow Lake, and the light off the snow made his face look older than thirty. His father had died on Tuesday. It was Thursday now.

Joss's hands were steady on the wheel. Under her coat, taped flat inside a tampon box in the side pocket of her duffel in the trunk, was a driver's license with a different name on it, and beside that, folded in a square of tissue, a plastic stick with two pink lines she had not told anyone about.

"There," Reed said. "That's Hal."

A figure stood beside a plow truck at the edge of the marked route, one arm raised, the other holding a bundle of cut boughs. A shaggy black dog sat in the snow next to him with the patient look of an animal who had spent his life waiting on a man with an idle job.

Joss stopped and rolled her window down. Cold came in like a hand.

Hal Buckley was maybe sixty-five, with a face weathered to the color of a saddle and eyes almost hidden in the folds of it. He looked at Reed first, and something in him softened and sagged.

"Reed," he said.

"Hal."

"I'm sorry about your dad. He was a fair man to work for." Hal shifted the boughs to his other arm. "Mostly."

Reed laughed once, without humor. "Mostly's right."

Hal leaned down toward the window and Joss caught the smell of woodsmoke and two-stroke oil. "You'd be the wife."

"Joss."

"Hal Buckley. Caretaker, plow driver, and the man who tells everybody the same thing when they come across." He nodded back the way they'd come, then out at the ice ahead. "So here it is. Weather service has a warm front coming up out of Iowa. Six days out. Maybe five. Wednesday it's supposed to hit forty-one and rain. After that nothing crosses this lake but an airboat, and I've only got the one and it's in pieces in my shed. You get me?"

"Six days," Joss said.

"Five, if it hurries. When I take the boughs up, the road's done. Don't drive off the boughs, don't stop on the current line, and if you hear the ice talk, keep moving." He straightened and slapped the roof of the car twice, the way men in this country do. "House is warm. Your mother's got the whole place lit up like Christmas, Reed. I don't know what to make of that."

They drove on. The dog trotted a few strides after the car, then gave up.

"Current line," Joss said. "What's that?"

"There's a spring channel on the west side of the island. Water moves under the ice there all winter, so it never sets up as thick. Hal marks a dogleg around it. My grandfather lost a snowmobile in it in 1978." Reed rubbed his thumb along the seam of his glove. "He got out. The snowmobile's still down there."

Joss made a small noise of interest. Inside her chest something was going very fast and very quiet.

She had known about the current line for four years. She had a photocopy of a Department of Natural Resources bathymetric survey of Winnow Lake in a cardboard box in a storage unit in Duluth, along with nine years of newspaper clippings, a sheriff's incident report obtained by request, four unanswered letters, one restraining order, and a photograph of a nineteen-year-old girl in a maroon polo shirt standing at the end of a dock with her hair coming out of its clip.

The island came up out of the white slowly, the way land does in winter, until it was suddenly enormous: forty acres of red pine and birch riding above a granite shore, and a long log building with three chimneys and a wraparound porch, and a row of shuttered guest cabins going off along the shoreline like a sentence trailing away. Below the house was a boathouse with a green metal roof, and a dock frozen into the lake, its cribbing wrapped in ice like a bad plaster cast.

That dock. She looked at it for exactly as long as a person would look at any dock, and then she looked away.

"Home sweet home," Reed said. His voice had gone flat.

"You said you hadn't been here in three years."

"Four."

"You said three when we got married."

"Then it's been four since I said three." He tried to smile. "Joss. I want to say something before we go in."

She waited.

"My mother is going to be very kind to you," he said. "That's how you'll know to be careful."

The drive was plowed to bare gravel. There were two cars already parked in the turnaround, and a black pickup with a topper, and someone had shoveled the porch steps down to the wood and then stopped halfway, as if they'd been called inside.

Beatrice Ainsley came out to meet them without a coat.

She was in her middle sixties and built narrow, in a gray cardigan, with silver hair cut in a blunt line at the jaw. She held her arms out to Reed and he went into them, and Joss watched her husband become nine years old in the space of a step. Over his shoulder his mother's eyes found Joss's face and stayed there.

"So," Beatrice said. "At last."

"I'm sorry it's like this," Joss said.

"Everything worth doing in this family gets done at a funeral." Beatrice released her son and took Joss's hand in both of hers. They were startlingly warm. "You're smaller than in the photograph."

"There's a photograph?"

"Reed sent one. Christmas before last, I think. You were on a boat." She smiled. It was a good smile, well made, entirely without warmth at the bottom of it. "You're in the east room. I'll warn you, it's the cold end of the house. The furnace has never reached it properly and Hugh would never spend the money. Now he can't stop me, so perhaps next winter."

"It'll be fine."

"You say that now." Beatrice was already turning. "Curtis is here. Curtis brought Pippa. Curtis has been here since eleven this morning and it is now half past two, so you'll want to adjust your expectations of Curtis."

Inside, the lodge smelled of woodsmoke and cold plaster and something faintly sweet underneath, like old varnish. The great room went up two stories to a ridgepole, and a fieldstone fireplace took the whole north wall. There were mounted fish on boards with brass plates. There was a long table with twelve chairs. There was a bar in the corner with a hinged counter, still stocked, still with a hand-lettered card that said ASK ABOUT THE SHORE LUNCH.

Nine years, Joss thought. Nine years since a paying guest sat in one of these chairs.

A man came out of the kitchen doorway with a glass in his hand. He was heavier than Reed and had the same jaw under it, softened. He was maybe forty.

"Little brother," Curtis Ainsley said.

"Curtis."

"He came." Curtis raised the glass in a wobbling toast to no one. "He actually came. Eleven million dollars and a dead father, and here he is, right on time."

"Don't," Reed said quietly.

"I'm not being unkind. I'm being accurate. Those are different." Curtis's eyes swung to Joss and hung there a second, and she saw them focus, and then something behind them flickered and went out again. "You're the wife."

"Joss."

"Curtis." He put out the wrong hand, the one with the glass, and had to correct. His palm was clammy. "Fair warning, Joss, we're a terrible family and you married the quiet one, which means you got the worst of it, you just won't know for years."

From above them a voice said, "Are you being terrible already? It's not even three."

A girl was leaning over the balcony rail on the second floor. Seventeen, in an oversized flannel and wool socks, dark hair scraped back. She had a camcorder up at her eye — an actual camcorder, boxy, silver, with a flip-out screen and a little red light burning.

"Pippa," Curtis said, "put that down."

"No." She panned the lens across the great room and settled it on Joss. "Say your name for the tape."

"Joss Dennison."

"Dennison?"

"I kept my name."

"Huh," said Pippa, and Joss heard the small mechanical whir of the tape moving. "Smart."

Beatrice came through with an armload of towels. "Pippa, that thing is thirty years old, you'll break it."

"It was in the hall closet under a life jacket. It works fine. There were tapes in the case and everything." The girl lowered the camera and her face, without it, was tired and young. "I like tape," she said, to Joss specifically. "You can't delete anything by accident. It's just there. Forever. Whether you want it or not."

Joss said, "That's true."

"Everybody hates it."

"I don't hate it," Joss said.

The girl looked at her a moment longer than she needed to, then went back down the hall.

The east room had a bed with a quilt, a dresser, a chair, a window with two panes of frost-flowered glass, and a radiator that ticked without producing heat. Reed set both bags down and stood in the middle of the floor with his coat still on.

"Four days," he said. "Five. Then we're gone."

"Hal said the road closes Wednesday."

"Then Wednesday." He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Sorry. I'm — sorry. I told you it would be bad and then I forgot how bad."

"It's your father."

"It isn't only that." He dropped his hands. For a second she thought he was going to say something real, and she felt her whole body brace for it, the way you brace for cold water. Then he said, "There's a lawyer coming in the morning."

"A lawyer."

"Paula Simms. Dad's estate attorney out of Pike Landing. Apparently she's driving the ice road with a steel case handcuffed to her wrist or something equally ridiculous." He shook his head. "There's going to be a scene. My mother expects a will. My father, as I understand it, left something else."

"What kind of something else?"

And Reed Ainsley looked at his wife of three years across a cold bedroom in the house where he grew up, and said, "I guess we'll find out."

He went to shower. Joss waited until she heard the pipes knock, and then she took the duffel to the chair, unzipped the side pocket, and slid out the tampon box. Inside, under the cardboard flap, was a Wisconsin driver's license, expired, with a photograph of a young woman with longer, lighter hair and a rounder face. The name on it was EMILY R. DORAN.

She looked at it for three seconds. Then she folded it back into its hiding place, took out the pregnancy test in its tissue, looked at that for three seconds too, and put it away as well.

Outside the frosted window, down the slope, the dock ran out into the ice, and the light was starting to go blue.

She had said her sister's name out loud maybe four times in four years. She said it now, once, silently, the way you press on a bruise to check it still hurts.

Katie.

Five days.